README.md

Student Insights

Student Insights gives educators an overview of student progress at their school, classroom-level rosters and individual student profiles. It also allows them to capture interventions and notes during weekly or bi-weekly student support meetings.

User personas: Who we're serving

There are three main user personas we're serving. Principals, Interventionists and Classroom Teachers. Right now we're focused primarily on serving principals, and the rough progression will likely be to Interventionists next. Early adopter Classroom Teachers are great, but focused on scaling adoption across all classroom teachers isn't a priority yet.

Principals are responsible for a school, from ensuring all students are progressing academically to making hiring and staffing decisions for teachers.

Interventionists are typically folks who provide some kind of specialized service to students, like counseling, behavioral services or specialized reading instruction. They have caseloads of 20-70 students and are often involved in interdisciplinary teams focused on supporting students who are most at-risk.

Classroom Teachers are responsible for teaching all subjects in an elementary level, and at the middle school level typically teach two subjects, with a few periods of each subject.

Product overview: How we're helping

School overview

Principals and intervention specialists can get an overview of all students at school, updated automatically as new data comes in. This includes demographic information (left), academic progress indicators (center), and educational interventions (right).

Educators answer specific questions like "how are 3rd grade students doing on reading assessments?" and "are students on free lunch programs equitably distributed between 5th grade classrooms?" This is useful for understanding progress for groups of students, and also for identifying particular students in need of targeted interventions.

Data can be exported as a CSV for more sophisticated analysis.

Classroom rosters

Classroom teachers can see rosters of all students in their classroom, calling out high-need students and letting them jump into the student's case history and record of previous assessments and interventions.

Student profiles

Individual student profiles show how students are progressing on core academic skills, as measured summatively by MCAS or on more frequent formative measures like STAR assessments.

Student profiles also contain the full case history of demographic information, attendance and behavioral support.

Capturing meeting notes and interventions

It's one thing to have data, but acting on it to improve student outcomes is what really matters. Schools with regular student support meetings for at-risk students can track interventions like additional tutoring hours, attendance contracts or social skills groups. This is a building block to close the loop and monitor how effectively these interventions are serving students.

It also allows capturing meeting notes as part of the student's record, which is particularly important on interdisciplinary teams.

Contributing

We'd love your help! Take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on ways educators, developers and others can get involved and contribute directly to the project. You can also learn how to join our online chat channel and submit pull requests and join us in person at our weekly hack night with Code for America, in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

How it works

The project is a Rails app with a Postgres database. There are background tasks that replicate data from the Aspen SIS system and STAR assessment system into the Postgres database. This enables rapid iteration and experimentation on new product features with minimal risk to these existing production systems. The Postgres database is the system of record for unique data captured by the Student Insights product (eg., notes from clinical meetings and information about targeted interventions that students are receiving). Authentication is handled by the district's LDAP service.

Admin dashboard

The admin dashboard has one function: Allow admins (principals, assistant principals, district admins) to set user roles and permissions for other staff, in particular staff who are not classroom-based teachers.

The admin dashboard is available at /admin for educators whose admin attribute is true.

Development Environment

This is a Ruby on Rails app that uses a PostgreSQL database, and relies on React for much of the UI code.

1. Install dependencies

One you have those set up, you can install the Ruby and JavaScript dependencies with:

$ bundle install
$ yarn install

2. Create database tables and seed them with demo data

bundle exec rake db:create db:migrate db:seed

This will create demo students with fake student information. See the demo site above for the set of educators you can use (or look at test_pals.rb).

If you are willing to run a longer (~10 minute) task that will generate ~600 students to more closely approximate one of our pilot schools, set ENV["MORE_DEMO_STUDENTS"] = 'true' before running the seed task.

3. Start the app

Once you've created the data, start the app by running yarn start from the root of your project. This runs two processes in parallel: the Rails server and a Webpack process that watches and rebuilds JavaScript files. When the local server is up and running, visit http://localhost:3000/ and log in with your demo login information. You should see the roster view for your data. You can stop both processes with command+c like normal, and look at package.json if you want to run them in individual terminals.

If you miss something, tests will run on any pull request you submit, and after merging to master as well.

5. Write code!

This project is a Rails app and has a typical Rails project structure. If you'd like to get up to speed on Rails, we recommend checking out their great documentation. The only difference is that JavaScript code is not managed by the Rails asset pipeline, and is built separately by Webpack.

It also uses React for much the user interface code. If you'd like to get up to speed on React, we recommend their great documentation, and the Tutorial and Thinking in React pages in particular.

JavaScript code is written in ES6 syntax and JSX. The build process uses the the react-app Babel preset (the same as create-react-app).

If you use Sublime Text Editor, we include the studentinsights.sublime-project file to standardize minor things like tabs vs. spaces, indentation, and generally make it easier to work with our folder structure. Go to Project --> Open Project and select that file to load it. Sublime remembers which project you were last in, so you only need to do this once. (Here's some background info on how projects work in Sublime).

These virtual machines expire after 90 days, so take a snapshot right away and rollback when it expires (make sure to log out of Insights before taking a Snapshot, and that no student report PDFs are lying around in the VM's downloads)

Use Storybook
Running yarn storybook will start a storybook server on port 6006. You can use this to create "stories" iterate on UI features or components in particular states, separate from how they exist within the product. To add new stories, write a new .story.js file and update ui/config/.storybook/config.js.

Browser/OS Targeting

Category

Target

Comment

Browser

IE 11

"Should be all IE 11 by now." – John Breslin, Technology Department, Somerville Public Schools

OS

Windows 7 and 8.1

"Maybe some Win10 next year." – John Breslin, Technology Department, Somerville Public Schools

Data differences between districts

Somerville IT runs the SQL scripts in the x2_export folder every night to create CSVs and dump them to an SFTP site. We import the CSVs to Insights nightly.

Somerville

STAR (assessment vendor)

STAR IT team runs a job when Somerville STAR assessment results come in that dumps fresh CSV data to an SFTP site. We import the CSVs to Insights nightly.

Somerville

EasyIEP

EasyIEP runs "change export" of IEP PDFs that have changed and sends them to an SFTP nightly. Somerville IT runs a job to copy those files into Aspen and another job to copy those files to an Insights SFTP site. We import the PDFs to Insights nightly.